Chapter 35: 35: Simpler Times

The road was quiet when we got back on it, as though it too had been cowed by our display of brutality. I had to admit, a part of my viciousness back there was because of Jitters. She hadn’t described what had happened to her at the hands of the Docksgord gang, but in place of a description my mind had improvised, and what it saw was horrifying.

So when I had disemboweled that man with my tail, that’s what I’d seen. I saw the shadow that crossed her face when she mentioned it.

The battlefield graveyard at least seemed truly quiet and still now. It was odd how you could feel movement nearby, even if there was no way you could actually hear, smell, or see it. I liked this silence, it was the silence of safety.

“Oh god,” Leon said quietly, as though he didn’t want to disturb the eerie peace. “Did we really have to kill them all? Who even were they?”

“Docksgord gang,” Bassi said neutrally. “They’re—“

“—A bunch of evil bastards,” Jitters finished, stepping carefully out of the decaying woodwork. “Human traffickers, murderers, rapists, and all the other nasty words.”

“This is Jitters,” I said, pointing to the girl as she glared daggers past us and towards where the battle had taken place. “She’s with us.”

“How do you know that they were bad?” Leon asked with wide glassy eyes. I could see the horror of killing another person churning behind them.

Jitters’ expression went blank, her eyes turning downcast. “I know it from intimate personal experience.”

My friend, dense as ever, asked, “What do you mean?”

A hand reached up to cuff him across the back of the head. “Do the fuckin’ math dumbass,” Beth snapped, rolling her eyes. “Hearing that, I’m glad they’re dead. Of course, Basilisk’s little bit about mercy was more than enough.”

I licked my lips apprehensively and nodded thanks to Beth. “Bassi and I caught a few of them not too long ago, they were working the Halligord district,” I told the assembling group of adventurers. “Looking for girls. To sell.”

“Jesus,” Leon muttered, finally understanding what we were talking about.

“One of us had joined them,” I continued, watching faces for reactions.

It was Victoria who picked up the thread of the conversation. “Wait, from our class? Why?”

“Take a guess,” I said with a weary sigh. “You’re the one who stares daggers at boys, you should have some idea.”

Her expression turned dark. “Ah. Right.”

“What did you do with him?” Leon asked, face ashen.

Pinning him with a long look, I paused before explaining in a deadpan, “I explained that he was sentient filth and then I crushed his windpipe under my foot.”

My former classmates all glanced around at each other in shock, and I kept careful note of the ones who looked particularly scared. Guilty consciences tended to show in subconscious movements and actions.

Victoria unsurprisingly quirked a slight smile. “Good.”

“We can talk about the monsters we’ve killed around a campfire, for now we need to put down some miles,” Bassi interrupted, her brusque tone contrasting with the gentle hand that pressed to the small of my back.

That seemed to galvanise Leon and he got back to his job as the leader of his merry band of nerds. As much as I was putting on an icy and indifferent exterior, there was a part of me that was eager to have the opportunity to be among my own people again. There were memes that just didn’t land well on non-earthling ears.

While they got themselves sorted out, Bassi and I turned to each other.

“That should hopefully confuse them enough to keep them guessing for a while,” she commented, trying to clean blood off one of her swords.

“I’m still worried about the others,” I told her with a frown back towards the walls.

The massive walls of Anamoor were made of an alien substance that I hadn’t seen either here or back on earth. A sort of dirty white colour, it was pockmarked with dents, scrapes, and burn marks. Trophies from various assaults on its great height, the failed results of which littered the field around us. I just wished they could protect our friends from the dangers within, not just without.

“They’ll be fine!” Jitters said cheerfully, dumping our packs at our feet with a grunt. “Next time, you’re retrieving these yourselves. I’m not nearly strong enough to lug anvils around like you two are. That is what’s in there, right? No wait, is it bricks?”

Bassi gave a laugh and rolled her eyes. “Definitely bricks in mine. I think Mist has the anvil.”

I had to fight a grin when I saw our little human tagalong trying to figure out if the wind fae was joking or not.

“Thanks for dragging them over to the road, Jitters,” I said with a grateful, if amused, smile.

Our journey into the wastes beyond the city began in earnest as we all trudged along the old road. This close to the city the roads weren’t officially maintained, but those who used them regularly still made sure they were free of debris and foliage.

Past the battlefield the land was covered in a dry, hardy grass that did little to add colour to the brown and grey that seemed to permeate everything. It was as though colour itself were depressed out here.

To our north was the large mountain range that ran under the wall and into Anamoor, and to our south was the coast, stretching off away from us as it curved back east. As for us, we made west, parallel to the mountains.

Life seemed to be having a difficult time thriving out here. Foliage was less vivid, trees were gnarled and twisted, even the few animals we spotted had abnormalities that almost had me wondering if there was a radiation problem out here. What stopped me from actually inquiring about it was remembering how life had thrived within the Chernobyl zone.

“I grew up in an area that looked like this area, before it was corrupted,” I told Bassi as we trudged along the road. “I imagine most of us here did actually.”

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“What was that like?” she asked, eyes full of curiosity. “I’ve only ever known my old home, the wastes, and Anamoor.”

“Greener, way way greener,” someone said nearby, and I glanced up to see Beth drifting back with a tentative smile on her face. “You told her about our old world?”

“Yeah… I did,” I said with a look at Bassi. My heart fluttered at the smile she gave me, eyes full of that depth that only came from looking at someone you care about.

We held each other in that embrace of gazes for a few seconds before I turned back to Beth. The corner of her mouth twitched in amusement, but she didn’t say anything to point out the obvious energy between my lover and me.

“It was somewhat important to telling her about… ah… why I was so confused by things,” I explained, remembering halfway through my sentence that I was talking about my gender swap.

Beth gave a giggle as my cheeks lit up red. “Were any of those things along the lines of going to the toilet with different anatomy?”

“She refused to be treated as a woman for a goodly long time,” Bassi commented with a friendly nudge at my elbow.

“I only just gave in like two weeks ago,” I grumbled. “It’s kind of confusing alright? Give me a break.”

I don’t know why I was even getting embarrassed by this. I guess it was one thing to make dirty jokes about dicks with Bassi and another thing to talk about it with people who knew me as… shit what was my name again? Daniel, that’s it. Even thinking the name made me shudder. Goddess, it was a truly strange experience to think back on my past self and recognise that we were both the same people.

It was like looking at a pile of reddish rocks while you held a sword made from their brethren. Yeah, they were all technically the same thing once, but the sword was so much better, so much more useful.

“Little Mist,” Bassi chuckled, running the backs of her fingers down my arm. “She came to us as a very confused ‘boy’ in a very tight outfit. That facade crumbled the moment she took her mask off.”

“Yeah, I gotta say, you know how to work a character creator,” Beth laughed, giving me a once over that had me doubting my previous estimate of her sexuality.

I let out a grumpy sigh and kicked at the grey dirt of the road. “Is it really that bad?”

“There are a lot of ways I’d describe your face, Mist, but bad is not one of them,” Bassi all but purred.

Oh god. Why did she have to get horny now instead of back when we had some alone time in the office?

Outwardly I was rolling my eyes, but inwardly I was gauging how hard it would be to catch up to the group if we slipped off for an hour or three. Probably best not to.

“Alright, enough teasing,” she chuckled. “Tell me about your home.”

“Well, it’s a hole in the wall with a ragtag bunch of thi—” I began before Bassi gave a snort and whacked my arm.

Beth laughed and launched into a proper explanation, “Well, there were roughly eight billion people on our world, and it wasn’t overrun by horrors. It was green in a lot of places, especially where we lived.”

“Eight billion,” Bassi whistled, eyes wide as she tried and failed to visualise the number.

“Yeah, most of the planet was developed to some extent. We came from a small island nation that nobody really cared about, safe even by our standards,” I said, continuing where Beth had left off. “The standards of living were a mile higher than here, we had comforts that not even the richest in Anamoor can boast.”

“Like TV,” Beth sighed wistfully. “It’s killing me, not knowing how Expanse ends.”

“Yeah, like TV,” I said, sharing in her nostalgia.

“You explained that one to me, I believe,” Bassi commented. “You could record a theatre performance and play it back whenever you wanted?”

“Close enough,” my classmate shrugged, adjusting her pack with a grunt. “Point is, this place is a fucking hellhole by comparison.”

“A hellhole with a very clear difference,” I said, flicking my wrist to produce a dagger made of inky purple shadow. “Magic.”

Well, that and the fact that this world has Bassi on it. That made it far better in my eyes.

Beth gave a nod. “Without that, we made do with far more sophisticated sciences.”

“Like mechanical horses that run on explosions!” Jitters exclaimed happily from behind, startling all three of us. Girl had been so quiet up until now.

“Ah… yeah, this is Jitters, our resident gearhead,” I laughed, reaching out and pulling the smaller girl up beside me.

The conversation continued for many long hours, talking about memories from our time on earth and generally enjoying the post apocalypse of a magical world. I did wonder how earth was faring without thirty or so of its most mediocre game development students. Had they even noticed? We were probably nothing more than a small newspaper clipping and a reddit post with like forty upvotes.

 

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